Outside, a macabre street party, a necrothon. Inside, Judge Basheer Waglay holds everyone spellbound.
This is the culmination of the 15-month Cape High Court drama that has followed every Hollywood rule — except that it is real, and the ashes of a six-month-old baby now lie in the Garden of Remembrance, not far from the Lansdowne home where she briefly lived and died.
Throughout the trial, the media have drooled over the details with necrophiliac fascination, delivering them to a public gorging themselves until they’re ready to burst.
Today is no exception. Photographers strut around with phallic lenses, television personnel trundle technology around on their shoulders, and later, after the verdict, the steps outside the courthouse are awash with flashing bulbs and microphones.
But first, the judge must finish his 139-page statement. He stops intermittently to allow his interpreter to repeat it all in Xhosa.
It is the third and final day of the judgement.
To his right, Waglay can see Natasha Norton, the mother of the murdered child, flanked by her boyfriend, parents, brother and the nanny who cared for the newborn and was in the house when the infant was stabbed to death. In tailored black outfits with pink shirts, ties and beads showing through, they form another strand of the melodrama.
In the dock, accused number three Dina Rodrigues, flanked by her four co-accused, remains poker-faced. A brunette with dark eyes and sculpted features, she has become a two-dimensional femme fatale magnified tenfold by the media.
She makes no eye contact with her ex-lover and father of the baby Neil Wilson, who provides the third strand of this bizarre crime passionel.
The judge works through the words of the only accused who testified, number five — 18-year-old Bonginkosi Sigenu, 16 when the murder took place. He repeats what Sigenu told the court: how the plan to murder a baby was discussed around a game of pool in a tavern. Accused number one, Sipho Mfazwe, was the recruiting agent.
‘It was a deal where a white lady wanted to pay R10 000 for a baby to be killed,†the judge repeats.
Next come the details that blur the lines between the stark reality and the cinematic imagery of the case, which has developed a life of its own. Before the murder, the four hit men — riding in accused number one’s taxi — got directions from a petrol station before making their way to 15 Scout Road, Lansdowne.
The next day, they arrived to carry out the deed. Accused number four, Zanethemba Gwada, tried to gain access to the house under the false pretence of wanting to deliver tele-phone directories, but Natasha’s brother Dylan refused him entry.
Citing the testimony of accused number five, the judge describes how a ‘white lady†arrived in a silver Corsa with a box to be delivered to the Norton home. Seeing her through the taxi’s windows, accused number five commented: ‘Look at the beautiful white lady in the Corsa.â€
She also held a waybill — the pretext for entry, and later, incriminating evidence carrying Rodrigues’s handwriting and fingerprints and fingerprints of her co-accused.
Crying quietly and squeezing her boyfriend’s hand, Natasha Norton is again told of the moments leading to the death of her child on June 15 2005: accused number one told number five to take the baby into the room and throttle her. But the baby was crying and, thinking of his own brother, he instead rocked her until she stopped crying.
Accused number two, Mongezi Bobotyane, then came into the room and later, after a period when a robbery also took place, they were re-united in the taxi where number two produced the bloody knife which had been plunged into the baby’s neck.
Other details are recounted in the judge’s steady voice — how the men later met Rodrigues who gave them an envelope from which each took money; how accused number five bought himself some new clothes; and how he was later offered R20 000 by his own attorney not to testify.
After a final summary, Waglay steps into the moment everyone has been hanging for — the verdict. It is the second charge, of murder, which steals the limelight: ‘All five are found guilty as charged.â€
It is the point at which the crowds burst open like ripe fruit, as soon as the judge allows it. But it also creates a large vacuum once filled by anticipation.
For the media, there are now only peripheral events with no central drama to link them: the pathos of the Nortons’ visit to the baby’s grave and Natasha’s statements after her long silence. There are the images of family togetherness and the relief over the verdict.
On the courtroom steps, it is grandfather Vernon Norton’s description of Dina as ‘a wicked, scheming woman†that grabs the headlines. The ‘white lady†is the focus, her co-accused quickly fade into obscurity.
Baby Jordan’s angelic face becomes a cameo of tragedy, a small icon that has come to brand one of South Africa’s most infamous murder trials.
A tabloid boasts, on its cover, of ‘8 pages of Dina todayâ€. Posters shout of ‘Dina the Bitchâ€, a comment piece urges: ‘Let the racist bitch rot in jail.â€
In the vacuum between the verdict and sentencing, the public rehearses time-worn fantasies of good and evil, reward and punishment. Natasha Norton, the heroic victim, experiences rejuvenation through the birth of another baby girl, Keira, in the weeks before the verdict.
Dina — or the ‘Baby Killer†as the tabloids have now officially designated her — will suffer justice at the hands of her prison cellmates. ‘Prisoners fight for fresh meat,†yells the headline. ‘There will be a fight over her and the blood is going to flow before the final outcome — it is gruesome and a lot of women end up in hospital.â€
In race-obsessed South Africa, the case’s racial dimension also dominates the airwaves. Did Dina, a wealthy white woman, prey on those she knew would be desperate for the money? Were they, to quote one tabloid, ‘Dina’s disposable weapons to have a pesky coloured baby killedâ€?
Until the sentencing, on June 4, the Rodrigues and Norton families will continue to hog newspaper columns as the media and the public remain locked in their ghoulish embrace.
The words of a woman outside the courtroom said it all: ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now. There’s no World Cup cricket, and no Dina either.â€
South Africa’s murders most foul
Human beings are endlessly fascinated by murder trials, particularly when women are accused or victims, and sex — and race in South Africa — are part of the mix. The ‘Baby Jordan†trial meets all these criteria.
The following are some of South Africa’s most heavily covered murder cases:
July 2004: A Johannesburg student, Leigh Matthews, disappears from outside her university and her body is found two weeks later. A media frenzy focusing on the deceased, and later, killer Donovan Moodley, ensues. It is a murder mystery involving a Tanzanite ring, the body being placed on ice, and a bevy of false myths to do with Nigerian druglords.
December 1997: Serial sex killer Moses Sithole is sentenced to 2 410 years in prison for 38 murders and 40 rapes. He is given no possibility of parole for 930 years. Sithole lured his victims to secluded spots in the Gauteng region where he assaulted and raped them before strangling them with their own underwear or belts.
January 1990: Paedophile Gert van Rooyen kills himself and his lover Joey Haarhoff as police close in on them after the disappearance of five teenage girls between 1988 and 1990. The media, which had been following the case of the missing girls, goes into overdrive. The story is revived this year when bones exposed by floods in KwaZulu-Natal are said to be linked to the case.
July 1983: South Africa’s own Bonnie and Clyde grip the public imagination as 35-year-old Peter Grundlingh, who has just come out of prison, and Charmaine Phillips, a rebellious 19-year-old, team up for a killing spree that leaves four men dead. Grundlingh is hanged in 1985, while Phillips — too young for the gallows — serves 20 years in prison before being released on parole.
October 1932: The case of the poison murderess Daisy de Melker attracts unprecedented public interest. Queues of spectators snake around the corner at the Johannesburg High Court from the moment the trial begins on October 17. She is hanged for the murder of her two husbands and her son.